Natural Language Enabled Web Applications

This article describes the usage of XML in a multimodal dialog system based on the Web architecture. The motivation behind the work is based on the observation that Web based interactions can be viewed as dialog conducted in an iconic language. Since the Web architecture accommodates multiple input/output methods by abstracting device details, it seems a straightforward way to weave natural language (NL) into the Web is to convert NL semantics into objects consistent with the Web architecture. We demonstrate how one can employ the extensibility of XML to implement federated understanding in which multiple sources unbeknownst to one another may collaborate to resolve and fulfill user’s commands. We also demonstrate how the separation of content and presentation principle of XML can be used to implement distributed dialog applications that are less susceptible to the diversity of Web accessing devices.